


If It’s Something He’s Chosen Or Otherwise Deserves, Does It Actually Matter?

by TheTriggeredHappy



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Ambiguous Teams, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Internal Conflict, canon-typical violence mention, essentially just expanding on my characterization of sniper, i guess if you could call it that??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28041489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTriggeredHappy/pseuds/TheTriggeredHappy
Summary: “It bothered him more when he was younger. Early teens, mostly. A bit in his early twenties, as well. And every year around early February, for some reason. But mostly he’d come to terms with the fact that he had something wrong with him and would just have to learn to deal with it.”
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	If It’s Something He’s Chosen Or Otherwise Deserves, Does It Actually Matter?

**Author's Note:**

> [[i’m not even sure if this makes sense, but hey, sometimes the character monologue is more about vibes than making sense]]

Mick “Sniper” Mundy was in his late twenties when he found out that a series of different things he dealt with were not, in fact, standard fare.

He suspected. He’d always suspected, at least as long as he remembered, he’d always thought that it felt a bit like he was playing the wrong card game, reading from the wrong dictionary, like he was given a different set of instructions than everyone else and told to get the same task done. And he thought maybe that was the reason for a lot of different things.

It bothered him more when he was younger. Early teens, mostly. A bit in his early twenties, as well. And every year around early February, for some reason. But mostly he’d come to terms with the fact that he had something wrong with him and would just have to learn to deal with it.

He’d started taking headache medicine for his migraines, at least. Stopped beating himself up so much for the fact that he only ever had the energy to cook something as complicated as canned soup or pasta or rice, and most days not even that, just munching on jerky and drinking lukewarm water only when he remembered and coffee or alcohol the rest of the time. And he stopped bothering with trying to think anywhere ahead at some point, any further than a few months in advance, because the internal arguments about whether he’d even be alive that long proved damn exhausting and he never got anywhere.

And he liked to think that he was doing alright, on his optimistic days. That he wasn’t a complete disaster. He remembered to shower and shave and get his hair cut, and got his laundry done on something like a schedule, and wasn’t ever late for work, and talked to other people every once and a while, and was eating at least once a day even through the worst of February. Hell, compared to how bad some people had it, he was doing excellent.

He just... didn’t understand some things.

Because... it just, it seemed like he was supposed to be doing better than that. Like it was standard fare to not even really have to think particularly hard about how many meals he should eat in a day, like so much of what he spent his time worrying about was meant to be almost automatic. Like he was supposed to be worrying about bigger things. Taking on more. Doing more. Being more, even.

But instead he was a grown adult man living independently and finding out over a team dinner that actually, it wasn’t normal how his vision blacked out for a second when he stood up too fast most of the time. That it usually took something very significantly bad to make someone spend their night off lying in bed staring off at nothing.

That sure, Scout’s general braggery and Spy’s air of confidence and Medic’s claims that he was basically a god among men were joking exaggerations, but actually most people really did, genuinely, legitimately, truly like themselves. Not just on their most optimistic days, not just after an hour of hard introspection on those optimistic days, and not just in a way of lying through their teeth to keep up a charade of stability that he’d sort of figured everyone had going.

And actually, for most people, they only felt nauseous and fatigued and shaky and headache-y and generally a little bad overall on their very bad days. And no, as a general rule they had pretty good memory for things, and as a general rule it was pretty easy to get tasks done, and they didn’t get sick more than a few times a year, and they most _certainly_ didn’t spend time several hours before and after social interactions worrying about how they would or did go.

Most people, most of the time, felt good. Really. And it didn’t take work for them to be able to say that. No dread, no general feeling of ailment.

And Soldier admitted that he also got headaches a  lot, but that was mostly because of all the concussions he’d gotten over the course of his life, and he’d figured out that a good diet and plenty of exercise and the occasional dose of extra-strength medicine or a vacation day took the edge off. And Scout admitted he had a lot of memory problems and issues with meal times and in general a number of mood swings, but he’d started drinking caffeine and sticking to a stricter schedule and called home often, and that helped iron out a lot of the kinks. Pyro mentioned that they tended to bake when they were stressed and it helped out. Spy said that his smoking had originally started to help with his nerves, and didn’t say much more than that.

It was Demo who piped up and said that all the sticking to schedules and exercise and hobbies didn’t do much for him—hell, he admitted that he knew he had a drinking problem on top of all his other ones, and that lifestyle adjustments were a pretty big leap to try to make directly from something like that. That it would be an unreasonable expectation for himself to try to make that leap so quickly. But he continued to talk, and said that actually he used to be doing a lot worse, and he was finding that talking to the team and accepting their shoulders to lean on every once and a while was doing wonders for him, and finally, for the first time in a decade, he was at least getting in his eight hours of sleep every night.

And he didn’t know where to go with all that. Because like a revelation, it suddenly occurred to him that... this was their worst. This was what they considered the bad part of what was going on with them on any given day. And maybe there was something to be said about grand-scheme sorts of things—they killed people for a living, reminded the part of his brain that sounded like his dad, even if they didn’t exactly stay dead it still had to count in someone’s book—but overall, on their day-to-day, this was what they considered to be bad.

And it sounded an awful lot like what he considered to be... not good, he knew it wasn’t ideal, but the best that he could safely talk about without potentially getting put on some kind of list.

When that was their standard of what bad looked like, how was he supposed to admit anything to them? How was he supposed to admit that practically every night he had to sit and actively fight the temptation to drink his mind away, and usually only even succeeded because he had work in the morning? How was he supposed to admit that he still didn’t have an excellent reason worked out on why he shouldn’t just wander out into the desert and keep going until the vultures came by to pick at his bones? How was he supposed to admit that he only ever cleaned his van in a fit of fear and paranoia, mostly as a byproduct of him searching it for some kind of bug or bomb or poison or contagient or whatever other horrible thing came out of the dusty corners of his mind, which happened to him every other week and meant he had a very clean living space? How was he supposed to admit that he just...

...Didn’t like himself all that much and felt like a liar every time any of them seemed to, even for just a moment, enjoy being around him?

It... he didn’t know what it was all about, the thing in television where someone sat and loudly bemoaned all the things they hated about themselves, hate with a capital H. In all his years hanging around some particularly issue-laden individuals, he hadn’t met anyone like that—or, anyone like that who didn’t almost immediately try to use it to coerce him into doing or saying something in a way that seemed almost shameless. In his experience, that wasn’t how it worked. Not for him.

He just... came up empty. Just didn’t know what there was to like about him. There was just nothing there. Mediocrity across the board, the only things he excelled at being things that were morally dubious at best—shooting a gun, for example.

And truth be told, he just didn’t like being stuck in his own head. In a body that ached and dizzied with hands that shook over nothing and stubble that kept growing back too fast. He wished he didn’t have to be around himself. He was unpleasant to be around.

And apparently, that wasn’t the standard human experience. Apparently, that was actually rather strange. Apparently other people, at worst, didn’t mind themselves, and at best actively really really liked themselves.

Really. Not joking, not lying, not making it up, not actively trying to be optimistic. Just... most of the time, unless something very very bad happened to them.

And what exactly was he supposed to do with that?

He understood, logically, in some part of his brain, that what he was... _supposed_ to do was talk to someone about it. Someone. If he was correctly picking up on what Demo had been saying, apparently the person _he_ talked to about this sort of thing was Soldier. Or most of the Attack team, actually. But he also knew them a lot better, and was a friendlier bloke in general, a pleasant person to be around. And he couldn’t exactly just wander up to someone and start just... talking about those sorts of things, could he? That seemed like it would be extremely rude. He would need to be their friend first before that would at all become something he had any right to do, and that concept instantly brought to mind the people who bemoaned their problems and promptly expected things of him and that thought in conjunction made him feel extremely extraordinarily guilty.

And he thought that maybe one idea was to try and fix it an amount on his own before he went and tried to make it anyone else’s business, but he’d also been considering most of the general issues that plagued him to be a sort of ‘we can get there when we get there’ kind of issue. For a later date and time. And then he just... hadn’t gotten around to it.

Truthfully, half the problem was that he didn’t know where exactly he was meant to start with something like that. And he could imagine few things more embarrasing than asking someone for help. To admit that he didn’t know how to start down that path when it seemed like everyone else already knew—hell, to admit that he didn’t even know when he was supposed to have already figured it out—was humiliating. And he didn’t particularly enjoy humiliation, thank you very much.

That’s why he went with professionalism as one of the things he tried to project more than anything else. He didn’t ask questions, he didn’t know anyone well enough for them to notice what a trainwreck he was, he didn’t have any reason to hang out with others after hours since the idea made his hands shake just thinking about it—

And yes. He was lonely. Yes he wished he could connect to people. Yes he wished he could handle social situations, could handle being around others without having a script in his mind beforehand, yes he wished that the urge to _be social_ or any of that nonsense was stronger than the overwhelming feeling of nausea that rode on its coat tails.

But unfortunately, he didn’t have a particularly good track record regarding wishes, if his continued presence of a pulse was any indication.

There he went, with yet another thought he couldn’t share with people without getting put on a list somewhere.

He’d made a decision, somewhere along the line, that he just wasn’t meant for people. Sometimes you had to quit when you were ahead, admit that something wasn’t worth it. And the vague idea of people maybe liking him and wanting to hang out with him and inviting him to do things, while nice on some level, while comforting on his worse days, also sounded like so much work and heartbreak and headache. And maybe it would pay off, but even the payoff itself didn’t seem like much, and it wasn’t guaranteed.

And he understood already that there was very much something wrong with him, so he chalked it up to that pretty easily. He was messed up. He had something wrong with him. And usually that was a bad thing, but maybe this was good. Maybe he would be more efficient like this, without stressing out over social situations and whatnot. Maybe this wasn’t worth pushing past. Maybe he should put energy into settling into a life alone rather than fretting day and night about every missed shot at a life around others.

But then his mind supplied him with that old saying, that old ideology that had haunted him briefly in the time just after he’d set out on his own. Of being known and observed by others. The tree falling in the forest. Something about whether he was... _real,_ if there wasn’t anyone around to prove it. About how he really didn’t know much of anything about himself when he really thought about it, since most qualities were observed by others rather than himself. Was he funny, if he never talked to anyone enough to tell a joke? Was he kind, if he never knew anyone else to perform kindness towards? Was he clever, or was he just unchallenged, never facing down anything he wouldn’t know about?

He understood that some amount of what he dealt with, internally, within the confines of his own head, was ridiculous. Excessive, maybe. That some of the ways his mind tried to keep him in check were unreasonable. But he didn’t have much of anything to check against, and surely it was unreasonable to even check against the rest of the team anyways. Of course they wouldn’t be so mean to themselves internally. They didn’t deserve that. And Sniper did. Simple as that.

Simple as that.

And how stupid did he have to be anyways, to not have noticed half of it? It was his fault, for not paying better attention.

This was all his fault.

Maybe if he’d put in the work, to be stronger, to be smarter, to be just a little less weak...

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Was he supposed to have just... been better than this? Was this where people ended up when they failed somewhere along the way in life? In camper vans with nobody to see them, doing jobs that didn’t matter to much of anyone, earning money and spending it on alcohol and food that didn’t cost much? Is this where people disappeared to when everything went wrong?

He suspected, deep in his heart, that he was just a lunatic. That any standard, reasonable human being would hear him talking about his problems for a total of three minutes before denouncing him as utterly deranged. That none of this even actually made sense in a way that mattered and he was just stringing together tattered parts of a broken mind like a six-year-old’s art project, and at most they’d smile and nod and call it all interesting and then push it into a drawer to be forgotten about and then thrown away years down the road without even thinking about it.

He didn’t like himself. And he didn’t think it mattered that he didn’t like himself, when it came down to it. He could only spend so many nights staring up at endless starry skies above wide deserts before deciding that he was actually rather small in the grand scheme of things.

And that was really all he had to say on the matter, actually.

**Author's Note:**

> [[still on tumblr. part 2 eventually]]


End file.
